


Silky Story

by Aria



Category: The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Selkies, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:40:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28096296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aria/pseuds/Aria
Summary: In the summer of 1889, Ade Larson took passage on a laker from Chicago to Sault Ste Marie, and on the docks of southern Ontario she heard her first story of the sea women.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Silky Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thereinafter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereinafter/gifts).



In the summer of 1889, Ade Larson took passage on a laker from Chicago to Sault Ste Marie, and on the docks of southern Ontario she heard her first story of the sea women. "Always claimed his wife was a silky," a burly man told his companion, half-shouting to be heard over the calls of the other dockworkers. "She'd stare out to sea for hours, like she was longing to return to the waves. But he didn't have no skin of hers, so I'd say he simply couldn't give her satisfaction."

Ade was always on the lookout for the scraps of strange stories, and in the last four years, she'd become good at spotting the ones that gleamed at the edges, hinting at other worlds. She pulled her cap low and ducked under a rope, coming up next to the burly man. "What's a silky, then?" she asked him.

Most people, in Ade's experience, would answer when confronted by a direct question, no matter how odd. This man was no different. "A seal woman," he said. "You heard of 'em? They climb out of the water to walk on the land a wee spell, and if an enterprising young man such as yourself were to stumble upon her skin and hide it, you could take her to wife."

In Ade's experience, too, most women would do more in vengeance for such a violation than simply stare longingly out at the sea. Ade's experience didn't much cover women trapped by circumstance, nor had she yet seen a seal. Her long afternoon of talk with Julian hadn't covered sea women, but one day was hardly enough time to describe a whole world, and Ade always followed rumors of strange seas. "This friend of yours, with the silky wife," she said, "where might he be?"

"Summerside," the workman said. "Prince Edward Island."

Ade nodded. She'd spent two weeks in the hags' forest, where you found direction in crushed pine needles and the patterns of moonlight on the ground. She'd waded three days through rust-colored mudflats where every horizon looked the same. She'd never heard of Summerside, nor of Prince Edward Island, but now she knew they existed, and that a man there claimed he had a silky-wife. Ade tipped her cap to the workman and went on her way.

Over fifteen-hundred miles separated Ade from the origin of the silky story, but she knew how to travel. She hopped a timber raft to Ottowa. From Ottowa to Montreal she walked beside the river, a pleasant four-day journey punctuated only by the incredible sweep of clouds across the vast sky above her. In Montreal she learned that the Grand Trunk would take her all the way to Moncton, a mere half-day's walk from the sea and the island where the sea woman might live. The railway fare cost almost all the money Ade had earned since Chicago, but there was always more work to be had, and Ade was curious to ride the train. The Grand Trunk brought her to Moncton in a night and a day, faster and further than she'd yet gone in the world of her birth. Ade slept crammed in among the other passengers, the stars a smear above her in the huge sky, and woke at first light to a crick in her neck and a baby crying. Ade stretched out, and took a turn rocking the baby until it fell back asleep. She kissed the soft down of the baby's head and handed it back to its mother, then rested her forehead on the soot-stained windowpane, watching the world rush by with excitement beating in her breast.

Moncton was a bustling town, just too far from the sea to smell of it. Ade asked if anyone there had heard of silkies, but no one had. Ade asked how to get to Prince Edward Island, and she was directed to a woman with a market cart. The woman was brown with sun, her hair turning to white. Ade took her own hair down from her cap and approached. "You're from the island?"

"That's right," the woman said, eyeing Ade. She had piercing blue eyes, and Ade liked her at once, though they had nothing in common beyond a certain force of personality. "Who's asking?"

"Ade Larson, ma'am," Ade said. "I was told you'd be the one to talk to, if a body was looking for passage and work."

"You ever farmed potatoes?" the woman asked.

"I've farmed, ma'am."

The woman snorted. "Lord knows John could do with the extra hand. Well, come on, let's see if you can sell as well as farm, and you might come with me tonight."

That day Ade helped sell potatoes, and that night she slept in the back of the cart. The woman was called Ellen Arsenault. She stored up her words for practical use, which suited Ade fine. They took a ferry out to Prince Edward Island the following afternoon, and rolled along through a lush green country to a little collection of houses that Ellen called Darnley. "Nearest proper town is Summerside," Ellen said.

Ade grinned to herself. She wanted to ask straightaway about the silkies, but she'd spent near every last penny traveling here, and a week of farming potatoes would give her something to start with, if the sea women came to nothing and she had to move on. So, for the next week Ade spent her days in the sun on John and Ellen Arsenault's acre of land, hauling a water bucket among the rows of potato plants, checking leaves and soil for pests, all quicker and more efficient than John could with his old eyes and old hands.

On Sunday, the Arsenaults invited Ade to church with them in Summerside. Ade accepted, not out of piety (she hadn't thought much on God in years) but because a church lawn after service was a good place to hear town gossip. Ade combed her hair and wore the faded blue dress Ellen lent her. She kept her head bent in church, letting the pastor's words wash over her in meaningless sound, and thought about how the Arsenaults' small clean house had a scent of sun-warmed wood and grass perfumed with the nearby sea. Julian's world had left a similar taste in the back of Ade's throat. She _knew_ , her heart sure as a lodestone, that somewhere on this island waited another sea.

The service let out, and the congregation drifted out into the warm summer sunlight. "Ade Larson, ma'am," Ade said, bobbing half-formed curtseys. "Pleasure, sir." She followed Ellen's rounds of greetings, mouthing all the vague polite phrases a respectable young woman was expected to say. Ade could feel their eyes measuring her, more than half of them finding something wanting, but Ade had never much cared for her own respectability, and cared for it less than nothing in the past year. She bared her teeth to their disapproval and talked freely with those parishioners who seemed interested. "I heard you have a story in these parts," Ade said, to one and another, "about the silkies, the sea women."

A few people looked at Ade strangely for this; a few more nodded, like they'd heard silky stories but didn't know much more. One old man confirmed the details the dockworker had given in Sault Ste Marie, but none of them were the Summerside fellow who'd claimed his wife was a silky. Ade nodded and thanked them for their time, and on the cart-ride back to Darnley she sat quiet and thoughtful.

Ellen cooked them all a Sunday dinner of fresh-caught fish from the Summerside market. Ade was set to eat her dinner without talk, but halfway through, John Arsenault set aside his fork and said, "Miss Larson, did I overhear you asking about the silkies?"

"You did," Ade allowed. John was looking at her with a little frown-line between his brows, like she'd tripped over a worry he couldn't erase, and Ade nearly laughed as she realized she could've started her questions with him. "Y'see, sir, I came here following the silky stories. Do you know about them?" She said no more than that: folks tended to supply whatever reason they wanted to her questions, and didn't need her help for that.

"I do," John said, slow. His frown line deepened. "George Campbell met one. Must've been back in '43, and I'm afraid you won't get anything from him, Miss Larson: he's been dead these past twelve years. But George was my neighbor, growing up, and he told me." Ade leaned forward in her seat, and John leaned in too. "It was down by the sea caves. George found a young woman on the beach; beautiful, he said, but odd, too. Her eyes were too far apart, and that oil-black you see on seals. She didn't speak a word of English, or French, or anything else George tried." 

John glanced at his wife, who was still eating her fish steadily, smiling a faint, indulgent smile. "George gave her clothes and a hot meal," John went on, "but he didn't think to go looking for her seal-skin. He was a kind man, George, and he wouldn't have wanted to keep anyone that way. She was gone the next day, and George told me about it, so it'd be more than just a wild dream."

"Thank you," Ade said. "It's a good story. Where are the sea caves?"

"Just up the north shore," John said. "Maybe five kilometers of walking." He hesitated. "Why?"

Ade shrugged one-shouldered. "Curiosity," she said, and got back to her fish.

She was up early the following day. She ate a wedge of cheese at dawn and strode among the rows of growing potatoes with her water bucket, giving them a last round of tending because the Arsenaults had treated her well. Then she walked across the long green fields, beneath the wide blue sky, until she came to the stretch of beached coastline riddled with sea caves. 

Some of them were little more than crawl-spaces, smelling of wet sand and the rot of tide-pools, but Ade eeled her way in, looking for the openings between worlds. When she didn't find them, she inched back out and emerged covered in sand, shaking it from her trouser-legs before she tried the next cave. Some of them were bigger, dripping, echoing spaces with shining floors or mysterious pools that looked fathoms deep but only came to Ade's ankles. Ade stepped into the pools holding her breath and expecting to drop, and when her toes only sank into sand or between worn-smooth pebbles, she felt about in the water for anything strange. She'd long since learned that not every portal between worlds was as literal as her first blue door.

At last the sun sank below the western horizon and the caves became dim enough that further searching was futile. Ade followed the rumble of her stomach back up the beach, and across the fields, and to John and Ellen's clean little house. She'd done her morning's work, so neither of her hosts commented on her absence, but the frown line between John's brows grew deeper.

The next day, after she'd tended the rows of potato plants, Ade went down to the caves again. And she continued, that day, and the next, and the next, until she'd scoured half the beach. 

On the fifth day, Ade found the silky world.

It was in a mid-sized cave, where Ade had to stoop but wasn't forced to crawl. In its dim depths, dripping with moisture, was an archway of stone, and on the far side Ade could see a curving tunnel, water shimmering off its walls. It was no more or less promising than other natural formations she'd seen in the past few days, but when Ade stepped through the archway, she was plunged for a moment into a directionless, weightless, crushing blackness. The in-between space, Ade called it, and recognized it with elation, and came out the other side into elsewhere.

The archway looked the same from this side, and Ade was still in a cave, but the rocks were made of a material that reflected the water on the cave floor, turning everything bright. Ade moved towards the mouth of the cave, sand soft beneath her bare feet, and found herself standing on a shallow beach, the glittering black sand quickly giving way to water. The sky above was the color of pewter, the sea below the color of slate, and both stretched in every direction. Here and there the water was broken up by dark rocky islands. Ade took a deep, ecstatic breath of the sea air, cool and rich with salt and secrets. It didn't look like Julian's world, but every world was wide, and this one held the sea from horizon to horizon.

She set to exploring. Ade's first obstacle, in this new world, was the water. She didn't have a boat, and though she'd taught herself to swim in rivers, well enough to keep her head above the surface, Ade wasn't about to fling herself into the sea with no plan. She walked down the short beach and dipped her toes into the gentle lap of waves: the water was cool but not cold, the temperature of summer on the Atlantic. Ade squinted back up the beach and saw that she'd come out near the headland of a small island, much like the others that dotted the sea. The island was a jumble of rocks and small trees that resembled wind-twisted pines. 

Something screamed from the trees and launched itself from a branch: a black and white seabird, all sharp diving angles. Ade thought she was standing too far away to have startled it, but something had prompted its flight, and she watched with interest as the bird wheeled up like a kite and pulled itself tight, plunging into the waves a few yards from shore. Up it bobbed again, a silvery fish thrashing in its beak. Something else broke the surface behind it, round and dark and slick.

 _A silky_ , Ade thought, with excitement and satisfaction. She promptly folded herself up, sitting down on the sand to appear less of a threat. She was a guest in this world, and so far, it hadn't steered her wrong to be polite and let those whose home she'd entered take the lead.

The silky's round head drifted closer, and closer yet, and stopped a few feet from shore. Ade and the silky eyed one another curiously. Mostly submerged in water, Ade couldn't see much of the silky, but she could see it had a mostly human face, apart from those wide-set oil-black eyes. Its skin was light and freckled, and long, wet black hair fanned around it in the water. _It_ seemed a discourteous appellation; _she_ would do, at least until Ade could find out if there was some better word.

Not for the first time, Ade wished she'd had more than one afternoon with Julian, so she might have learned at least a piece of his babbling, flowing native language. Still, Ade had got on well so far despite the language barriers in every world, so she said, low, "How d'you do? I'm Ade."

The seabird swallowed its fish and shot off into the sky with one decisive flap of its sharp wings. The silky drifted closer, more of her face rising above the dark water. She had a wide flat nose and the very human curve of a shy smile on her face. Ade scooched back, giving the silky more room to come ashore. She couldn't read the intent in the silky's smile, and she hoped that it was an expression of trust in the unknown, and that her experience of her world wasn't harsh. Ade had been around creatures who couldn't imagine her as a threat; she'd been around creatures who would smile up to the last inch away and then unsheathe their fangs. There was sand beneath Ade's fingers, and she reckoned she could fling a handful in the silky's eyes and bolt if need be.

She watched the silky rise up onto the beach. Water streamed from the silky's long dark hair. She was utterly naked, with generous rolls of fat padding her body, and webbing at her fingers and toes. She moved up the sand towards Ade with rolling grace. She was magnificent, and Ade smiled back at her, careful not to bare teeth. The silky regarded her, still dripping wet, still smiling that shy smile. She opened her mouth and made a noise not unlike a dog's bark of enquiry.

"No, I don't speak silky," Ade said. 

The silky blinked; Ade noticed that her eyelashes were long and thick. Then, to Ade's delight, the silky lowered herself onto the sand, kneeling so that she and Ade were eye-to-eye with a few feet between them. She opened her mouth again, this time making a chuckling sound, though Ade judged it was less amusement than reassurance.

"Well, that's very hospitable of you," Ade said, not paying much mind to her own words beyond what they could convey with tone. She opened her hands, holding them palms-up. "Shame we don't speak the same language, so I can't ask you 'bout Julian, but your ocean is beautiful, and I'm real pleased to be here."

The silky was smiling wider, as though Ade's patter charmed her. She stood up again in a slow, undulous motion, and watched interestedly as Ade also scrambled to her feet. Then the silky nodded, easily the most human gesture Ade had seen from her yet, and turned to walk up the beach. Five steps in, she stopped, looking back over her shoulder, which was a good enough invitation for Ade to follow her.

The silky led her on a sandy path up from the beach and into the interior of the small island. In five minutes, Ade saw that the silky was leading her to a clever little house made of black rock, formed into a sort of dome of interlocking stonework, and woven grasses to make a door cover. She settled down in a comfortable-looking hollow outside the house, and patted her webbed hand on the ground nearby, watching Ade intently until Ade had lowered down into a cautious seat near her. Then the silky raised her head and shouted up to the sky, a series of complex, carrying barking sounds. She kept her eyes skyward, so Ade also squinted interestedly up into the bright pewter clouds.

After a minute she spotted another one of those angled seabirds, or perhaps the same one. It wheeled like a kite, dove down in sharp dark silhouette, and came to a hopping landing near the silky, another silvery fish in its beak. The seabird didn't swallow this one, but instead dropped it at the silky's webbed feet. She gave a soft chitter, and the bird took to wing again, leaving its fish behind. The fish was still alive, Ade saw, flopping weakly, but even as she watched, it went still. The silky nodded again, another of those startlingly human gestures, and set the fish on a flat rock near the door of her house. She glanced at Ade and gave another soothing chuckle before vanishing through the doorway. Ade stayed sitting, recognizing enough of what was going on to suspect that a meal was forthcoming, so she had no cause to flinch when the silky reemerged with an obsidian knife in her hand. She wasn't at all worried that the silky might attack her with it: her host stayed on the far side of the flat stone, keeping up a continuous chuckling sound and darting Ade concerned glances.

"I don't mind your knife," Ade told her softly. "Awful kind of you to offer me a meal. You're more hospitable than some folks I've found in other worlds, and every one of 'em would be a better place if there were more like you. I ain't worried, ma'am, you go on doing what you're going to do with that fish."

The silky smiled, seeming as reassured by Ade's tone as she'd hoped for Ade to be by hers, and set to gutting the fish. It came apart in beautiful pink and silver filets, each one laid carefully scales-down on the flat stone, and it was only when the silky had finished her work that Ade realized the silky had no intention of building a fire nor cooking the fish. Ade had the notion that raw meat wouldn't go down as well for her as it might for the silky, but she'd rather try something new and learn to avoid it than refuse it from fear of the unknown.

She shuffled closer to the flat stone and took the piece of fish the silky nudged in her direction. It was, to Ade's delight, delicious. The texture was nothing she was used to, the flavor rawer and wilder, and the fish's scales proved too tough for her teeth, but she ate every bit of fish the silky provided, and washed it gratefully down with a rough-hewn wooden cup of fresh water. 

The silky ate her own pieces of fish scales and all, and when she saw Ade had left her fish skin behind, the silky gestured to it with a smile and an enquiring chuckle. Ade handed the fish skin to her; the silky smiled wider and ate it down with her sharp teeth.

So Ade broke metaphorical bread with one of the sea women and became her friend. That night they slept side by side in the silky's round rock house, each pillowed on soft mounds of sand. When morning came, the silky led Ade back down the beach. Ade saw that the silky meant to lead her into the sea, so she divested herself of shirt and trousers, and did her best imitation of the silky's reassurance chuckle when she caught the sea-woman staring at her in astonishment. "The stories say it's you that takes off your skin, not me," Ade told her. "I wonder if you even have a seal-hide. I suppose if you did, you wouldn't dare take it off near strangers." 

She dipped her toes into the cool dark water, and slid down into the sea, naked as her silky friend. The silky, further out, observed Ade with watchful eyes until she was satisfied that Ade knew how to swim. Then she dove, and Ade did her best to follow. The water was surprisingly clear: its dark color came from the blackness of the rocks below. She watched in delight as the silky shot through the water, turned sleek and weightless, just as graceful as she'd been on land but obviously now in her true element. Ade swam up for air, taking in a huge joyful lungful before sinking back down below the waves. She spotted the silky circling a school of darting silvery fish: one of the silky's hands shot out, grabbing a fish easily. She brought it to her mouth and ate it there, underwater, then pursued the school again without coming up for air. 

Ade watched several this happen several more times, rising for her own air when she needed. The silky didn't surface once, though she did occasionally look up and smile at Ade. Eventually she beckoned Ade down, and Ade swum gamely towards the school of fish, but was unsurprised to find she wasn't cunning nor quick enough to catch one. The silky laughed at her, the sound carrying in an odd rippling way through the water between them.

When they came back to shore, the silky carried several fish for Ade. The sky was still the same bright color it had been when they'd gone into the water that morning, but Ade's fingertips were wrinkled, and she felt as tired as she might have at the end of a long, full day. She wondered if the days in this world were longer than they were in her own. She fetched her bundle of clothes and followed the silky back up to her house. When the silky brought out her obsidian knife, Ade settled next to her and watched how she butchered the first fish, then held out her hand for the knife. The silky considered, but did hand Ade the knife, and watched with approval as Ade gutted and apportioned the next fish. Twice the silky put her webbed fingers over Ade's own, changing the angle of her cuts, but otherwise left Ade to her work. They ate together, Ade ravenously and the silky with the air of a lady dining sociably on a snack.

Though it was still light out, Ade sleepily pulled on her clothes and went into the house to nap on the soft sand. When she emerged, it looked to finally be dusk, and another silky was there.

This silky also had long dark hair, shot through with strands of grey, though she didn't look elderly. She was just as fat as Ade's silky, and even more impressively freckled. The two silkies were having an animated conversation of quiet chuckles and chitters, which briefly stopped when Ade appeared. Ade and the new silky regarded each other. "Hello," Ade said politely, bobbing her head.

The new silky bobbed hers in return, and looked to Ade's silky for guidance. Ade's silky patted the ground, so Ade sat, and watched as the two resumed their conversation. Ade couldn't make heads nor tails of it, as it didn't have any of the sounds she even associated with language, but it was pleasant to hear and to witness: the two silkies seemed to enjoy each other's company, and Ade's silky had obviously assured her friend that Ade wasn't a concern. Ade still couldn't decide whether she'd come across a world where she was too alien to be a threat at all, or if the silkies had humans here with whom they had good relations, and they only thought Ade was lost. It was worth finding out, if Ade could think of a way to ask.

By the time true dark began lowering in, Ade had it. She made the chuckling noise she'd been offering to get the silky's attention; her silky smiled, and the new one looked astonished and chittered something at her. "No, sorry, we're no closer," Ade told her. "But..." She reached for a stick, and smoothed some of the dirt before her. "So, first, we got the ocean." Ade drew an approximation of waves, and pointed out to the sea. The silkies looked where she'd pointed, and back at her drawing, and back at her. They waited. "Well, that's inconclusive," Ade said cheerfully. She added a fish. "Here's our fish dinner." She pointed at her fish, then at the bloody remains on the flat stone.

Her silky gave an excited bark, pointing to the fish drawing and the fish remains and back to the fish. She nodded, and looked at Ade encouragingly. 

"Glad I'm makin' sense," Ade said. "Now here's the big one, ma'am." She drew a ship on the waves, just a triangle with a sail atop it, and hoped it might mean something to her hosts. "You seen any of these?"

Both silkies observed this drawing. They discussed it with each other. They examined it. They didn't give any sign of knowing what it meant.

"Ah well," Ade said. "Worth a try."

Even if this was Julian's world, Ade figured, the silkies lived too far away to know about boats. That concluded her quest. But Ade didn't want to step out on a kind host, so she stayed again that night, sitting out in the darkness and watching blue and purple lights unfurl and dance across the black sky, while the two silkies sat near and talked of silky things. Eventually Ade went inside for another sleep, and she woke to a grey dawn and her silky sleeping near.

Ade sat silent in the dawn, listening to the silky breathe. A part of her wanted to stay longer, to meet more of the silky's friends and to go swimming in the dark cool ocean again. There were more fish to be had, and she'd seen oysters in the shallows. But there was a hook inside Ade Larson's heart, pulling her from one world to the next until she'd found what she was looking for, and this world's sea was beautiful, but it wasn't Julian's.

She stood up, and slipped quietly down to the beach without waking the silky. The cave was still there, and the door, and Ade emerged on the other side into a warm, golden afternoon, salt crusting her hair. 

Ade went back up the beach, and across the fields, and to John and Ellen's clean little house. The Arsenaults received her with tears and astonishment: she'd been gone eight days by their reckoning, and John was sure she'd drowned. "Sorry to have worried you, sir," Ade said, but no matter how they pressed her, she didn't say a word about where she'd gone. Nonetheless they insisted she stay the night, and Ellen said that Ade could go with her to the Summerside market the next day, if Ade still wanted the work. Ade felt the hook in her chest, but allowed that the work would be very welcome.

In the summer of 1889, Ade Larson chased the story of the sea women from Sault Ste Marie to Summerside, and in a market stall on Prince Edward Island she heard her first story of the standing stones. "Said he was going to take a walk up the headlands," a woman told her friend, "and the fool man went into a circle of standing stones. Never heard from again."

"Begging your pardon," Ade said, "but where was this?"

"Cornwall," the woman said, startled by reflex into answering.

Ade nodded. She'd never heard of Cornwall, but now she knew it existed, and that someone there had vanished between standing stones. She was willing to stay with the Arsenaults until harvest. By then she'd have the money for an ocean liner to take her across the sea, to Cornwall and its standing stones and the next world.


End file.
